These Hands of Mine
by AHeartForStories
Summary: RttE Futuristic AU. After a long battle, Hiccup is left hospitalized and suffered a terrible loss. All that is left for him now is come to terms with it.
1. These Hands of Mine

_Finished around 2:30am. Constructive criticism is appreciated._

* * *

 **These Hands of Mine**

Hiccup wondered how complete silence could be this deafening.

There was the soft humming of the lights out in the hallway and the occasional footsteps of a nurse doing their rounds or of a doctor on a late night shift, but other than that it was mostly quiet.

Yet he found there was a stubborn buzzing aswell as a constant beeping tone in his ears. Combined, they almost seemed to be muffling his hearing.

That was what silence sounded like to him. That and the sound of his own voice inside his head. It couldn't be more obvious then now that he was alone.

He'd had visitors of course. His friends came by every single day even while he hadn't been awake to keep him company. His mentor often came by and his father made sure to stay whenever it was possible.

If it were up to them, he would never be alone. But it was already long past visiting hours and that meant they all had to go home, despites their many protests.

Those times were the hardest. The nights when Hiccup was left alone with his thoughts.

There was no one to distract him from the pain and he wasn't a fan of taking painkillers with their supplies limited. He was vulnerable to the lurking fears that now plagued him with his uncertain future. He was no longer protected from the very fact that his body would never feel quite right ever again.

He was left to experience everything that his friends, his family, had been shielding him from with jokes and laughter for hours during the day.

"Look at it from the bright side, Hiccup. Instead of just punching out three of a guy's teeth, you can dislocate his jaw instead! No one in their right mind is gonna mess with you now!" Snotlout had snickered, smirking at the thought.

"Think of the jokes you could make on Loki Day!"

"They will be truly glorious, H." Tuffnut had added to Ruffnut's claim.

"And you'll be more protected against dragon fire! No more burning yourself in the Dragon Nursery or the Training Ring!" Fishlegs had helpfully reminded him as there would indeed be no more burning of freckled skin on his arms and hands.

"If you still had any trouble lifting weapons before, Babe, you won't now. I'm looking forward to sparring with you again." Astrid had told him, carefully grabbing the hand nearest to her to hold on her lap as she sat on the side of his bed. He hadn't opposed to it too much then.

"I know you will recover soon, son. When you do, Toothless and I will be waiting for you." His father had kept his mind on Toothless, on the Night Fury who couldn't be here simply because his size wouldn't allow him too. That was all that had stopped him from making this hospital room his own.

They were his family by choice and as such they had done their best to keep him occupied during the day, to protect him for as long as they were able. They had been reluctantly to leave because of it.

But it was night now and Hiccup was sure that they were asleep.

He hoped so at least. They needed their rest and he'd hate it if they were kept awake by their worries. Even Snotlout, as uncaring as he tried to make himself seem, and the twins, as much as they loved violence, the chances that they were lying awake at night too were big.

With a sigh Hiccup moved to lie on his side. Despites the bandages around his torso and covering part of his face, he still did so with ease. He felt his arms moving with him, could hear them move, they were the very reason why he could still move. Yet it still felt like they weren't actually there.

As they settled on the mattress before him, moonlight shone down upon them and caused their reflective surface to catch Hiccup's eyes.

This was what was wrong with them. Why his body felt off despites the definite presence of a pair of arms.

They were replaced by prosthetics now. Both of them.

Their last battle against Viggo Grimborn, a hunter of and business man in the dragon- aswell as other markets with an intellect that rivaled Hiccup's own, had been an arduous one.

Fight after fight the two had tried to outsmart each other, think ahead of one another, pull moves before the opposing party could, and finally this war had reaped what had been sown months ago.

The Dragon Riders had attempted to take out one of Viggo's weapon storages to make it easier on them to raid future auctions and Hunter outposts.

It had all gone well until Hiccup had triggered a new kind of trap that caused a massive explosion. Toothless' thick fireproof draconic hide had protected most of his Rider's body from burning up alive, but it had quickly become clear that one of the eighteen year old's remaining three limbs was missing and another badly burned.

Toothless had saved his life, but failed to keep him entirely intact.

Hiccup didn't blame him. Though he knew the Night Fury absolutely loathed himself for failing, Hiccup found the fault lied only with him.

He should've been more cautious. He should've known Viggo would come up with newer and better ways to defend his merch. Because he failed to foresee this, that was why he had to suffer now.

What if it hadn't been him? What if it had been any of his Riders? What if it had been Astrid?

No, a large part of him knew he deserved this.

He didn't remember much of the night after that last explosion besides hellish pain. Though he had been told later on once he woke up after his first surgery that he had been awake enough to scream the lungs out of his body and deliver his Riders with new nightmares for the coming months to accompany the horrible smell of burning flesh.

It was the complete opposite of his eerie silence when he lost most of his lower left leg three years earlier as he had been unconscious then.

Unable to find a comfortable position on his right side Hiccup moved onto his left, the covers becoming stuck in an elbow of his as he did so, like it had done many times before.

Trying to remove the fabric from the joint had caused it the rip and Hiccup had to stop himself from growling out loud in frustration. He may have a room all to himself, but he still didn't want to risk waking anybody up.

Giving up on finding a comfortable spot, Hiccup simply chose to lie on his back and stare up at the ceiling. His body was recovering, but he found he was wide awake. He didn't feel like sleeping even if he wasn't.

Bringing a hand up to his face to pinch the bridge of his nose, cold metal met his freckled features instead of warm skin and briefly did it startle him.

Keeping the arm in the air, Hiccup found himself staring.

They were the best you could find on the market, his father had made sure of that. They were built to last, to carry weight, to replicate a real arm. A better model would have needed to come from Viggo's own collection, but Stoick outright refused to have his son humiliated like that after the loss he had suffered.

So Hiccup was stuck with these instead. He should be happy with them, though he knew they didn't possess the accuracy or functionality necessary for the sometimes very delicate parts he works with.

Well... used to work with.

He doubted he'd be allowed in his workshop ever again.

There were a lot of things he doubted he could do ever again.

Holding onto his saddle might be a problem. Despites the tighter grip this particular model provided compared to his flesh and blood hands, Hiccup felt nervous at the very thought of holding onto a saddle he couldn't actually feel anymore.

Tough as they were, he wasn't sure if he could show his face in the Dragon Nursery again in fear of hurting any of the hatchlings.

Hel, Hiccup didn't even know he would ever let these hands touch Astrid, who hadn't been his girlfriend for all that long yet.

He felt broken.

Not mentally, his mind worked just fine, but physically.

First midway down his lower left leg and now his right arm from his shoulder and his left from halfway down his upper arm. Though both harnesses to keep them in place required covering his two shoulders for the sake of stability and sturdiness, to optimize the functionality in his metal limbs.

Dropping his arm back down, Hiccup released another sigh.

He could feel everything. Every little shift of the harness, every little bolt and artificial nerve, the strain these would put on his body for the foreseeable future until he got used to them. In a way these arms could feel, but at the same time they couldn't. It was a frustrating sensation that drove his brain mad trying to figure it out.

Yet, there was nothing that could be done about it now.

His carelessness had ruined him. There was really no one to blame but himself. The bruises that littered him on both face and body, both the minor and graver burns, the loss of his arms... He couldn't even blame Viggo for this one.

He had no one to blame this one but him. And all he could do now was try to live with himself and the choices that brought him to his current reality.

The silence in his room continued. And it was more deafening than ever.


	2. The Guilty

_Surprisingly enough, I've had three peole requesting me to expand on the previous one-shot, so I think I will be turning it into a short series. The updates won't be frequent and I can't say exactly how many short one-shots I'll be adding to it, but here is at least one part I have written._

* * *

 **The Guilty**

To Toothless, the silence was unforgiving.

There was nothing to distract him, no one to keep him company, there was not even a single annoying Terror to keep him on his toes. All alone here in the room he shared with his Rider, he, too, found the quiet to be more than a little discomforting.

Curled up on the perfectly rectangular stone bed was the Night Fury who listened to the single sound keeping him grounded to reality.

Stoick's snoring, loud enough to go through walls that weren't all that thin to begin with, filled the dragon's sensitive hearing and kept him from dozing off and getting the sleep that his body surely needed.

Though the man usually agitated him during the night, Toothless didn't mind now. He very much preferred the sleepless nights over the ones filled with nightmares of how horribly he had wronged his Rider and how he had been doing so for years.

The leg had been his fault too.

When the Red Death had become an inferno of fire that had pushed even his fireproof hide to the test, he had grabbed hold of the then fifteen year old boy's closest limb with his teeth in his desperation to save him as he fell, which happened to be Hiccup's left leg.

Is already thinner bones had snapped, flesh had been torn, the limb was irreparably damaged within the seconds it took for Toothless to pull the human teen close to him and wrap his wings protectively around him like a near impenetrable cocoon.

Hiccup had known. Without ever needing to tell him, Hiccup had somehow always known. And he had forgiven him even faster than Toothless had after the loss of his left tailfin.

He had smiled that crooked smile of his and jokingly stated how they matched each other perfectly now. Whatever worries that might have stayed with the Night Fury after Hiccup had woken up to find his first stump had left. Because somehow he knew then that his human had already forgiven him.

But this was different.

Though it had been difficult to get used to walking on his prosthetic, the loss of one leg could not compare to the loss of two arms, of the two hands with which Hiccup had crafted such wonderful things throughout the years he's known him.

And to make matters worse, he hadn't been awake back then.

So Toothless felt grateful to go through another night without sleep. He wouldn't be able to bear having another nightmare take him back to the place where it had all happened, the rigged storage unite that had supposedly held some of the Dragon Hunters' more dangerous weapons. Hel, sometimes both times Hiccup lost a limb merged together.

Even while wide awake he could not stop thinking about it. His every waking moment was spend degrading and loathing himself for failing so. Reminding him that it was because of him that Hiccup screamed. That it was his fault Hiccup now had three seperate places in his body that would hurt terribly should the weather turn. That he was to blame for the very fact that Hiccup may never invent again.

His hands, once so talented, calming, and steady, were no more.

A whimper left the Night Fury as his heart ached. It was a suffocating kind of feeling that clenched painfully around his chest. Like he couldn't breath even if he tried.

Lifting his head up, Toothless' gaze came to rest on the bed that had remained unslept in because its owner was in the hospital.

Ignoring his tired body's complains, the dragon got up from the perfectly cut slab of stone to instead settle on the floor next to the bed. His head rested on the chilly mattress, serving as another reminder that it had not been used in quite a while already.

The sheets were in a light blue colour, but Toothless could very easily imagine what they'd look like stained with blood.

He'd imagined they'd look similar to Astrid's once blue shirt as she had shredded it and used it to tie around Hiccup's left bicep. After using the heated axe head of her weapon of choice to cauterize the wound before he had bled out completely. He had been thrashing and crying out the entire time.

Toothless was haunted by every second.

The call of his name and the look of alarm when Hiccup had realized in that single split second things were about to go terribly wrong.

The impact of the first shockwave that send them both flying and that caused the massive concussion the young man now also suffered, the wave that had nearly blown out his eardrums.

Toothless grabbing him and doing his best to shield him as sharp debris was flung everywhere. At the same time, fire and searing hot air spread all around them and ruined the leather saddle and the artificial tailfin.

The numb feeling of not entirely being aware of his surroundings, the strange out-of-body experience that forced him to take a second or two after the explosion to comprehend just what had happened.

And finally, the horrible realization that the blood-curdling wailing he heard came from the young man he had been trying to protect.

He had only noticed the arm was gone when Astrid got him to move aside and released a cry of alarm of her own before going to work, Fishlegs helping by getting Stormfly to heat up her axe quickly.

The right arm had still been there at that point.

It was only later on when Hiccup woke up after a coma that lasted a good few days that Gothi gave them her final diagnosis, that there was no saving that severely burned right arm and that amputating it was all that could keep him from suffering a slow death soon.

That was what Toothless had been told by Astrid when she came by him because there was no room for a dragon of his size.

He even failed at being by Hiccup's side as he came to discover the absence of his dominant arm and received the news he would be losing the other one too.

What good was being a Night Fury if you could not even keep your own brother by heart safe?

Toothless decided he'd stay by the side of that empty bed and let the silent void be filled by inner voices screaming their judgement upon him. It was the least he deserved.


	3. Bruises of my Fingertips

_I gave Hiccup a night of emotional hell and then Toothless, so wh not do the same for Astrid this time?_

 _Constructive criticism is appreciated._

* * *

 **Bruises of my Fingertips**

Astrid Hofferson greeted the sun with nothing more than an exasperated scowl as she watched its rays come peeking through the closed blinds and straight into her eyes after another mostly restless night.

She didn't feel like getting out of bed that day. She didn't feel like sleeping much either. Although her body was definitely trying to tell her something, she was in no mood to listen.

She had visited Hiccup yesterday. Astrid had visited her boyfriend, her very much disabled boyfriend, like she did every single day since the... incident. All of the Dragon Riders did. They'd hate for him to be alone for even the few hours they weren't allowed to come by.

It was always hard. On all of them. Astrid knew she wasn't the only one who loved Hiccup more than life itself, that was just all part of being a Dragon Rider, and she wasn't the only one who had trouble seeing him like that.

Though it was a million times better than to see him bleeding out and screaming or to see him motionless in a hospital bed with his entire torso bandaged and two arms gone instead of just the one after another surgery, to walk into his room and notice two prosthetics instead of his freckled ones was always a scare aswell.

Every single time she thought she had come prepared, the sight always managed to catch her off guard again.

The first time they walked into that room and saw him lying there, not one of them knew what to say or where to look. Their gazes were drawn to the reflective surface of the replacement limbs, but at the same time they wanted to look anywhere but their leader.

Because that was who he was. Their leader, the original Dragon Rider.

It was already hard to see a friend suffer like that. Much less a friend who, after all he had been through and after all he had survived, seemed so strong and invulnerable.

It was a good thing, for Hiccup's sake, that he had not been conscious that day.

There were certain images and sounds no one could ever wipe from their memories ever again. And it did not help that sometimes just hearing Hiccup's name was all it took to remember. They had all been there to find him underneath a frozen Toothless.

Astrid knew they hated it. They hated the fact that even the sound Hiccup's very name was now associated with such a traumatic experience. As if all the amazing things he's done, the amazing person he was, were erased in the mere blink of an eye.

And even if the trauma of seeing a living, breathing human being rendered into the mess that he was that fateful day did not bother them, there was something unnerving about how quiet and disconnected Hiccup could often seem as of late.

They all knew what he had been forced to sacrifice that day. Part of his very identity, of what made Hiccup so hiccupy, was now gone. And they knew he thought of nothing else if they did not keep him distracted.

Thing was, they were distracting themselves too.

Yesterday had been a good day. Or it had certainly started that way.

Tuffnut and Ruffnut had snuck in a few movies and a laptop to play them on. Hiccup had a front-row seat of course, since the computer was on his tray table, with Astrid sitting at one side and Ruffnut at the other, Tuffnut squeezing in behind her and both Snotlout and Fishlegs leaning over in the hopes of having a decent view.

There were plenty of comedies and parody movies in that pile, anything lighthearted they could find in their wide collection, and they seemed to have worked their magic.

For a short moment Hiccup was no longer paying attention to how unnatural the weight of his new arms felt like, the absence of sensation were not driving him mad, the threat of pain was left forgotten. For a short moment, he could laugh again.

But Astrid needed to get up for a drink. Her thirst was begging to be quenched and so she moved off the bed to leave the room, perhaps she could find a soda machine somewhere and she could bring something back for all of them.

She moved away from the bed.

"Hey, you mind bringing me something too?" Hiccup had requested, as kind as always, and it had stopped Astrid right in her tracks.

He was smiling, she could hear it in his voice. He was finally smiling.

It was why Astrid couldn't bear to say anything. Why tried to keep it to herself. She didn't want him to feel bad now that he was doing better.

But as silence fell in the room, her want to keep him safe was in vain.

"Uhm, Hiccup?" Fishlegs called his name and broke through the tense and quiet atmosphere, earning him his attention.

Hiccup's gaze moved to stare at his husky friend, confusion and worry evident on his soft features.

They all stayed silent. Not one of them spoke, sharing the girl's fear of ruining his good mood.

In trepidation did Hiccup look down at where they were all staring.

And noticed he had a firm grip on his girlfriend's wrist.

He willed himself to let go and stared at his prosthetic, but the damage had already been done. Astrid released a gasp of relief she could not stop and he heard it loud and clear.

"... Hiccup?" Fishlegs came again, but other than that it stayed quiet. No one said a single word. It even almost seemed like everyone had stopped breathing.

She felt stubborn tears stinging in her eyes and she wished Hiccup would never see them, but hesitantly did Astrid still take a glance at him from over her shoulder.

Her heart ached when she noticed the distant downcast look in his eyes. He looked so lost, so forlorn. Astrid felt like she had failed him.

So as the silence continued, she quickly left the room. And instead of getting them all something to drink like her original plan was, she made a beeline for the nearest restroom.

Once inside, the teenage girl locked it behind her and promptly began to sob with her hands in her hair. Her tears were unstoppable. Though she once thought herself in control of her emotions, they had conquered her instead.

They won because her wrist was throbbing in pain. Because the love of her life was left without hope. Because there was absolutely no way for her to help him. She was useless.

Hiccup was her boyfriend. He was her fiancé, her future husband. He was the one she would have the privilege of spending the rest of her life with. He was also severely disabled now with three missing limbs, even with prosthetics as advanced as his, and she was apparently completely helpless to aid him in any way. Truly useless.

Lying in her bed the very next morning, Astrid brought her wrist up so that she could look at the ugly bruise. And it really was ugly.

Black, blue, reddish pink and purple fingerprints stained her pale skin and she felt her eyes water again at the sight. Yet her blurring vision did not make it any harder to see.

It still throbbed, which had caused her mother to suggest she take a visit to the ER. The woman feared her daughter's wrist might even be broken.

Of all the scars littering her young body, it was bruise that hurt her the most.

Her eyes weren't watery because he hurt her physically. She knew Hiccup would never mean to hurt her. Not in any way. Instead her heart ached with the agony of remembering the way he stared at his own hand, both horrified and broken.

Perhaps that was what he was now. Broken.

They had thought it impossible with the way he pushed through every hardship in his life, but maybe it had finally happened. Something inside their deceptively fearsome leader had snapped and Astrid wasn't entirely sure if they could ever fix him.

When she decided to visit him again later that day, having ignored her mother's wish to see a doctor about that bruise, Astrid seemed just fine and greeted her distant boyfriend with the same smile he was used to seeing from her.

The girl had joined him by his bedside and rested a hand on the cold surface of his fist, which had closed when she entered the room, and she had pecked a quick kiss on his freckled cheek. Though his thin lips did form the tiniest of smiles, her affections did not lift his spirits at all. It looked like he had not gotten any sleep at all last night. In fact, he could barely even look at her, which hurt her more than she could've ever imagined possible.

Almost did a very reluctant finger of his opposing hand stroke the knuckles of hers, but stopped before one single digit could even touch her warm skin. Instead Hiccup settled for gazing at the wrist he had injured.

To his surprise, there were no bruises to be seen and Astrid didn't look like she was hurting. Yet, his deep upset frown persisted.

If Hiccup really focused and looked hard enough, his overly sharp eyes could still faintly see a blueish tone that didn't belong on her fair skin and that no amount of makeup she used could properly cover up.

How could Hiccup ever live with himself if even the slightest touch could harm the girl of his dreams?


End file.
